Integra DX-200

Onkyo's Integra CD player, pitched on a 16-bit converter, double oversampling, and four separate power supplies.

Overview

The DX-200 is a compact disc player Onkyo sold under its Integra banner. The period advertising was unusually specific for a CD deck: the conversion stage is everything. Onkyo's own copy argued that because the disc carries digital data, the player's digital-to-analog conversion method decides whether you hear the format's chief benefit - greater dynamic range with a total absence of noise. That is marketing talking, not a lab verdict, but it shows where the design budget went.

The converter was a 16-bit D/A system, which Onkyo described as exactly matching the 16-bit digital code used in the recording process. It was paired with double oversampling and digital filtering. Onkyo also fitted four separate power supplies to keep the stages from interacting, plus two house circuits it called Delta Power and Super Servo. Both were aimed at keeping noise and distortion out of the reproduction. A precision 3-beam laser pickup handles tracking, and Onkyo claimed fast track access as a result.

For convenience, the DX-200 had 16-track random memory and a full digital display covering track, index, elapsed and remaining time, and the contents of memory. All of it could be driven from the deck's wireless remote. Period advertising ran in the audio press through late 1985 and into 1986 - Audio (November 1985, p.29) and High Fidelity (March 1986, p.28) both carried the same "Beyond Conventional CD Performance" spread. That places the DX-200 among players pitched at listeners who were still deciding whether digital was worth it.

The documentation leaves out the boring-but-essential stuff: no list price, no production years, no measured distortion or frequency response figures, no service history. Treat the period copy as a design statement, not a benchmark sheet. Whether the four-supply, double-oversampling recipe produced a player that still sounds good decades on is something the surviving paperwork doesn't say.

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